Of all the essential tasks facing Rishi Sunak when he became Prime Minister, bringing down the level of legal immigration should have been by far the most straightforward.
This is probably not what the electorate had in mind when voting for Brexit in order to ‘take back control’ of the borders
All he had to do was tweak student and work visa requirements to ensure a significant fall from the gargantuan 606,000 net migration number bequeathed to him by Boris Johnson. He could then have tried to sell the idea to Tory-leaning voters that a downward direction of travel had been set in motion, with further down payments on the way (as Jeremy Hunt attempted to do with taxation yesterday).
Instead, the ONS has just published its new estimate for net migration in the 12 months to the end of June 2023 and the number is 672,000. That figure encompasses an astonishing 1.2 million incomers and emigration of just over half a million. Very nearly a million incomers were from outside the EU, which is probably not what the electorate had in mind when voting for Brexit in order to ‘take back control’ of the borders.
Startlingly, the Boris figure from 2022 was today also revised upwards to 745,000. So if Sunak wanted to end any lingering doubt and prove that he is the worst politician to occupy 10 Downing Street this century (a high bar) then technically he could now go out and claim that he has not presided over a record immigration volume after all.
Surely not even he would be clueless enough to do that. Yet his central contention on migration – set out in an early prime ministerial interview with Paul Goodman of the Conservative Home website – that the British public are only really bothered about illegal immigration is about to be smashed to smithereens.
Of course, he has failed to halt the illegal stuff too, despite his pledge in January to ‘stop the boats’. He now says that even more legislation is required to make further progress on this. Some people might have believed he was being sincere on that score, in spite of Suella Braverman’s damning revelations about his hesitancy, had he delivered on the Tory manifesto promise to bring overall levels of legal immigration down from the approximately 250,000 they stood at in 2019. Instead, he has almost trebled that number despite having full freedom of action to control legal immigration volumes from every country in the world.
We can expect more fireworks from Mrs Braverman on this score. After all, she wrote in her letter to him upon leaving the government that he had ‘failed to deliver’ on a promise to her that he would: ‘Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas.’
In other words, Sunak fully owns this situation. And it is not even as though the vast influx of new people has been economically justifiable. Official statistics released with the autumn statement yesterday showed that while massive net immigration has helped deliver whatever anaemic growth has occurred, it has also coincided with an actual fall in GDP per capita. So more mouths to feed, more pressure on public services and housing and not even a proportionate increase in the size of the cake.
Home Office sources tell me that Braverman and her ministerial team pressed Downing Street repeatedly to tighten visa requirements over the past 12 months but were rebuffed at every turn. She will no doubt have a paper trail to demonstrate this.
The Prime Minister has no hiding place. In direct contravention of his party’s manifesto promise he has deliberately contrived to drive net migration to severely socially corrosive levels. Some voters will no doubt note that as the head of a billionaire household himself, he will be well insulated against the downsides of all this.
The extreme nature of his policy is further highlighted by the fact that the 2022 figure was said by various experts to be the result of a blip created by post-Covid international travel getting going again, as well as bespoke migration schemes for Ukrainian, Afghan and Hong Kong citizens.
Nobody in Westminster thought that net immigration in excess of 600,000 was going to be the new normal. Nobody, that is, except the former Home Secretary whose recent speech about a migration ‘hurricane’ heading for the West is being vindicated in real time.
As we all know, most political careers end in failure. But failing catastrophically while not even trying to deliver the agreed benchmarks for success on a core policy amounts to an unprecedented exercise in cynicism. An unprecedented exercise in punishment on the part of the electorate seems by far the most likely political consequence.
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